You probably don’t need me to tell you, for example, that Skyhammer is your best friend when dealing with close-knit groups in the open, or that Rhino can hold a chokepoint pretty much by himself, providing somebody watches the flanks. Each is built around a couple of weapons and one or two special abilities, adding up to a style that can be guessed at from the character’s name alone. Another of the game’s strengths is how easily and naturally you work out what the mercenary classes do. For a footsore Londoner, stumbling on these inspires a special kind of satisfaction, like realising that you can just walk between two tube stations rather than diving into the smelly commuter soup that bubbles beneath the city’s tarmac.ĭirty Bomb is set a mere five years from now, in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, with London empty of life save for the odd, mysteriously radiation-proof pigeon and bands of mercenaries with exhilarating names like “Fragger”, who duke it out over bags of pharmaceutical specimens and personal data. Though dinky, the environments are packed with routes and vantage points, some of which hinge on skilled use of the game’s wall-jump (characters in Dirty Bomb are as agile as those of Brink, but the parkour stuff is there to discover rather than being thrust on you). Having secured and repaired the prize, you’ll peek over its carapace at the misty summit of the Shard as the beast inches towards your next objective through a bombardment of grenades. Leaping a tank barrier on the Bridge map, you’ll spend a half-second admiring the pale green ironwork of London Bridge Market before making a run on the crippled extraction vehicle languishing in the other side’s clutches. The maps aren’t modelled directly on areas from the city but flavoured by them, often to lovely effect. London is everywhere in Dirty Bomb, from its red letterboxes to the graceful arches of Waterloo Station, but unlike the reality, it’s seldom inconvenient. In fact, one of this formidable, comfortable shooter’s greatest strengths is how it chisels readable warrens of coverspots, overlooks and chokepoints out of the capital’s beguiling weirdness. You couldn’t ask for a less elegant setting for a multiplayer FPS in the Team Fortress vein, where a single sightline askew can be the difference between enjoyment and fury, but the studio has done a bang-up job. London, where heading a mile downriver feels like setting foot on a different planet. London, a metropolis blown half to bits during World War 2, then mutated into absurd, glittering shapes by overseas investors. London, a city that’s actually a bunch of medieval villages mashed into each other, where roads designed for horses struggle to find room for buses and Range Rovers. Splash Damage has a multitude of demons to slay with its latest spin on Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - the ever-controversial choice of a free-to-play model, the spectre of Brink, its previous stab at a new IP - but the most fearsome of these demons is surely London itself. I managed to get hopelessly lost on my way to last week’s Dirty Bomb event, squirrelled away in the trendy thicket of London’s Old Truman Brewery.
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